Meet the McGonigals: Kelly & Jane

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience — and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life.ng mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

Omar Khayyam Moore’s Autotelic Theory
“We call autotelic those cultural products that contain their own goals and sources of motivation: puzzles, games, aesthetic objects; such activities are in a sense cut off from serious and immediate problems of survival and welfare. As a heuristic principle for the application of formal methods in sociology, these products my be viewed as folk-models–i.e., models in the pre-scientific culture, with the help of which members of a society learn about and play at the workings of their society.” — http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4105055?uid=3739520&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102980412513